Pixie: A System for Recommending 3+ Billion Items to 200+ Million Users in Real-Time

User experience in modern content discovery applications critically depends on high-quality personalized recommendations. However, building systems that provide such recommendations presents a major challenge due to a massive pool of items, a large number of users, and requirements for recommendations to be responsive to user actions and generated on demand in real-time. Here we present Pixie, a scalable graph-based real-time recommender system that we developed and deployed at Pinterest. Given a set of user-speciic pins as a query, Pixie selects in real-time from billions of possible pins those that are most related to the query. To generate recommendations, we develop Pixie Random Walk algorithm that utilizes the Pinterest object graph of 3 billion nodes and 17 billion edges. Experiments show that recommendations provided by Pixie lead up to 50% higher user engagement when compared to the previous Hadoop-based production system. Furthermore, we develop a graph pruning strategy at that leads to an additional 58% improvement in recommendations. Last, we discuss system aspects of Pixie, where a single server executes 1,200 recommendation requests per second with 60 millisecond latency. Today, systems backed by Pixie contribute to more than 80% of all user engagement on Pinterest. ACM Reference Format: Chantat Eksombatchai, Pranav Jindal, Jerry Zitao Liu, Yuchen Liu, Rahul Sharma, Charles Sugnet, Mark Ulrich, Jure Leskovec . 2018. Pixie: A System for Recommending 3+ Billion Items to 200+ Million Users in Real-Time. In WWW 2018: The 2018 Web Conference, April 23ś27, 2018, Lyon, France. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3178876.3186046